iTunes 7 was launched nearly two years ago. Ever since, we've seen many Apple products come into the limelight, making the application well-known (or, on occasion, infamous). One reason for the infamy is the fact that you will almost always need iTunes to transfer videos to/from any Apple product. Since most of us (including me) would vouch for drag-and-drop services, is it any wonder that iTunes acquired such a bad reputation?

Having said that, iTunes 8 is out now and it scores over its predecessor in only a few ways. After downloading it, I feel there's no doubt some of the new features will come in handy, but as always it's all about pimping their own iTunes store.

Graphically, the new version isn't any different. In fact, for all purposes, there's nothing to talk about looks-wise. Save one thing: it seems Apple has taken out the option to disable the iTunes store arrow next to each song. Not that it makes a difference, but it's still a change.

The Genius sidebar is a new feature that was talked about at length by Apple during the launch. It's an intuitive service that learns your listening preferences, and automatically creates a probable list of artists in the iTunes store and lists it for you. For this, there's a sidebar that will regularly list the artists you might like. Also its available in only select countries, and India is not one of them.

What you can use, however, is the genius playlist technology that creates a list of probable songs from your library and makes a playlist that you might like. It doesn't use the metadata or list the songs genre-wise, instead it chooses the song based on what other users are listening to. This means only popular songs will yield a playlist. I tried With or Without you by U2 and it was not able to give me a "Genius" playlist. Also you will need to have an iTunes store account to be able to use it, which basically means you will need a credit card. FAIL!!

The other big change is the grid view. It displays all your songs in a grid, displaying the album artwork. Earlier you could choose between a list view, grouped album view, or coverflow format. Grid view makes it more fun, though it can be painfully slow on underpowered machines. It was decent when I tried it on a 2.4GHz machine with 1GB RAM.

Another (and perhaps the only appreciable) upgrade happens to be the new 3D visualizer. It rocks! But again, it's power-hungry and it was framing quite badly on my machine. On a Mac it was as smooth as butter, and looked good too. Oh, and the new iPhone 2.1 firmware is now available through iTunes.

Everything else remains the same, so at the end of the day iTunes 8 didn't do much to excite me. I'm still looking for a way to override iTunes for my iPod, and hopefully Steve Jobs will ditch the monopoly and create an open market. Till then, we'll have to continue using our iPods with itunes...